In very brief space the carriage was at Northwold, and desiring that it should wait at the corner of the Terrace, Louis followed Charlotte, who had jumped down from the box, and hastened forward to unlock the door; and he was in time to hear the angry, though suppressed, greeting that received her.  ’Pretty doings, ma’am!  So I have caught you out at last, though you did think to lock me in!  He shan’t come in!  I wonder at your impudence!  The very front door!’

‘Oh, cook, don’t!’ The poor breathless voice managed at last to be heard.  ‘This is Lord Fitzjocelyn.’

Cook had vanished out of sight or hearing before Louis’s foot was within the threshold.  The study-door was open, the fire expiring, the books and papers pushed back; and James’s fierce, restless tread was heard pacing vehemently about his own room.  Louis ran hastily up, and entered at once.  His cousin stood staring with wild eyes, his hair was tossed and tangled, his face lividly pale, and the table was strewn with fragments of letters, begun and torn up again; his clothes lay tumbled in disorder on the floor, where his portmanteau lay open and partly packed.  All Louis’s worst alarm seemed fulfilled at once.  ‘What has happened?’ he cried, catching hold of both James’s hands, as if to help him to speak.  ‘Who is ill?—­not Clara?’

‘No—­no one is ill,’ said James, withdrawing his hands, and kneeling down by his box, with an air of feigned indifference; ’I am only going to London.’

‘To London?’

’Aye, to see what is to be done,—­ship—­chaplaincy, curacy, literature, selling sermons at five shillings each,—­what not.  I am no longer master of Northwold school!’ He strove to speak carelessly, but bending over his packing, thrust down the clothes with desperate blows.

Louis sat down, too much dismayed to utter a word.

‘One morning’s work in the conclave,’ said James, with the same assumed ease.  ’Here’s their polite reprimand, which they expected me to put up with,—­censuring all my labour, forbidding Sunday-classes, accusing me of partiality and cruelty, with a lot of nonsense about corporal punishment and dignity.  I made answer, that if I were master at all, I must be at liberty to follow my own views, otherwise I would resign; and, would you believe it, they snapped at the offer--they thought it highly desirable!  There’s an end of it.’

‘Impossible!’ cried Louis, casting his eye over the reprimand, and finding that the expressions scarcely warranted James’s abstract of them.  ‘You must have mistaken!’

‘Do you doubt that?’ and James threw to him a sheet where, in Richardson’s clerkly handwriting, the trustees of King Edward’s Northwold Grammar School formally accepted the resignation of the Reverend James Roland Frost Dynevor.

‘They cannot be so hasty!  Did not Mr. Calcott call to gee you?’

‘An old humbug!’

‘I’ll go and see him this instant.  Something may be done.’